Week One – Boy, Am I Bored!
Just kidding. This not working thing is awesome. It’s thrillling just to have time to run errands in the middle of the day. I still kind of feel like I’m on vacation, but I suspect that will change when I run out of money. I should really make some sort of a list of projects. And then do them. Many thanks to all you kind souls who have posted and emailed words of encouragement.
Speaking of which, my old pal John Hodgman and I are working on a couple of podcasts for the NY Times to promote their new Funny Pages thing in the Sunday magazine. John is editing the humorous essays portion (there will also be a comic strip and some serial fiction from Elmore Leonard). Not sure there’s going to be a lot of room for JC sauce in this sandwich, but you should certainly expect some kind of “theme song” situation, and of course the standard Hodgman-Coulton magic a la our Little Gray Books podcast. I should mention, it doesn’t look like there’s actually going to be an RSS feed, which technically makes these things NOT podcasts. Also, there are only three of them, and they’re all going to be posted on the same day, Saturday September 17. I know. NOT podcasts. Look people, I just bake the funnycake, I’m not going to tell the Old Gray Lady how to serve it up.
Katrina Relief
If you’ve been waiting until you could safely buy a CD without any money actually going to me, now is your chance. CDBaby has just set up a way that all their artist can donate profits from CD sales directly to the Red Cross Disaster Relief fund to help victims of hurricane Katrina. I’ll be donating all my profits for the month of September. While this won’t be a huge amount of money, hundreds of CDBaby artists are doing the same thing, so together we may actually do some good.
If you’d prefer to donate directly to the Red Cross, you can do so here. Not to make you feel any more guilty than you already do, but it really sounds like it sucks down there. And I am familiar with the calculus of small donations, so believe me when I tell you that moderate amounts of small donations will most definitely add up to moderate amounts of money – I can only imagine what enormous amounts of small donations might do. You can change the world in a tiny way…
Don’t Quit Your Day Job
If you haven’t been paying attention, you might think that I am an actual rock star. This is not the case. An examination of my tax returns would indicate that I am in fact a “software engineer.” For the past 8 or so years I’ve worked at a small firm in NYC writing software. The music and the robot building and the podcasting have all been non-profit (or extremely small-profit) enterprises done in my spare time. Those days are over. I quit my job. This is my last week.
I’ve been psyching myself up for this for a long time, but saying those words still makes me pee my pants a little. Really, I haven’t even posted this entry yet, but just writing it makes me feel dizzy. I don’t have any specific plans, I just know that I need to reconfigure my life to have a more flexible schedule, more room for creative endeavors. I need to be more of an artist, or at least pretend to be an artist for a while and see if it ends up being true. But I don’t know how I’m going to make money, and I’m not even sure what I will do with the hours in my day. I’m just hoping that this leap of faith will open up possibilities – ask the universe and it will provide, blah blah blah. As you can see, I’m back and forth on this. Part of me is sure this is exactly the right thing to do, while the rest of me is screaming that this is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Time will tell. Right now all I can do is try not to panic.
There: now it’s real because it’s on the internet.
Public Domain Flowchart
For all the grumpies out there who claim it’s difficult to determine if a work is in the public domain or not, here’s a handy flowchart that makes it nice and simple: click me.
I don’t know what everyone’s complaining about…
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